From Community to Public Safety Governance in Policing and Child Protection JOHN EDWARD DEUKMEDJIAN AND GERALD CRADOCK University of Windsor L’interope ´rabilite ´ grandissante entre le maintien de l’ordre et la protection de l’enfant au Canada et au Royaume-Uni semble indiquer que nous nous trouvons au milieu d’un changement gouvernemental passant de la gouvernance communautaire a ` unegouvernance de la se´curite ´ publique. En effet, les discours mettant l’accent sur l’expertise locale en maintien de l’ordre et en protection de l’enfant se sont grandement transforme´s en raison des critiques sur le manque d’interde ´pendance entre les organismes. Les deux pays ont maintenant cre´e ´ des bases de donne´es interinstitutionnelles pour la gestion des personnes a ` risque. Cette inte ´gration administrative engendrediffe´rentes formes de re´glementations. Les auteurs concluent leur article en soutenant que cet ethos e´mergeant peut eˆtre conceptualise ´ comme une rationalite ´ gouvernementale naissante. The growing interoperability between policing and child protection in Canada and the United Kingdom suggests that we are in the midst of a governmental shift from community governance to public safety governance. Indeed, discourses emphasizing local expertise in policing and child protection have largely muted because of criticisms over the lack of interagency interconnectedness. Both countries have now developed national interagency databases for the management of persons of risk. This institutional integration engenders different forms of regulation. We conclude by arguing that this emergent ethos may be conceptualized as a nascent governmental rationality. IN THE 1990S, PUBLIC POLICING AND child protective agencies oriented their missions to service ‘‘communities.’’ For the police, community policing promised to address the root causes of crime through public consultation. For child protective agencies, the empowerment of case workers promised to r 2008 Canadian Sociological Association/ La Socie´te ´ canadienne de sociologie Dr. John Edward Deukmedjian, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Ave. Windsor, ON, Canada N9B 3P4. E-mail: [email protected].
Transcript
From Community to Public Safety Governance in Policing andChild Protection
JOHN EDWARD DEUKMEDJIAN AND GERALD CRADOCK Universityof Windsor
L’interoperabilite grandissante entre le maintien de l’ordre et la protectionde l’enfant au Canada et au Royaume-Uni semble indiquer que nous noustrouvons au milieu d’un changement gouvernemental passant de lagouvernance communautaire a une gouvernance de la securite publique.En effet, les discours mettant l’accent sur l’expertise locale en maintien del’ordre et en protection de l’enfant se sont grandement transformes enraison des critiques sur le manque d’interdependance entre les organismes.Les deux pays ont maintenant cree des bases de donnees interinstitutionnellespour la gestion des personnes a risque. Cette integration administrativeengendre differentes formes de reglementations. Les auteurs concluentleur article en soutenant que cet ethos emergeant peut etre conceptualisecomme une rationalite gouvernementale naissante.
The growing interoperability between policing and child protection inCanada and the United Kingdom suggests that we are in the midst ofa governmental shift from community governance to public safetygovernance. Indeed, discourses emphasizing local expertise in policing andchild protection have largely muted because of criticisms over the lack ofinteragency interconnectedness. Both countries have now developednational interagency databases for the management of persons of risk.This institutional integration engenders different forms of regulation. Weconclude by arguing that this emergent ethos may be conceptualized as anascent governmental rationality.
IN THE 1990S, PUBLIC POLICING AND child protective agencies orientedtheir missions to service ‘‘communities.’’ For the police, community policingpromised to address the root causes of crime through public consultation.For child protective agencies, the empowerment of case workers promised to
r 2008 Canadian Sociological Association/ La Societe canadienne de sociologie
Dr. John Edward Deukmedjian, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, 401Sunset Ave. Windsor, ON, Canada N9B 3P4. E-mail: [email protected].
engender flexibility and community responsibility over child abuse and/orneglect. For the most part, policing and child protection were disparate gov-ernmental functions. The police ideally addressed crime and child workersideally helped children ‘‘in need.’’ Moreover, the community orientation ofpolicing and child protection did not engender intraagency or interagencyrelations (nor was this an issue). Their emphasis upon community serviceprovision engendered atomism.
Both public policing (see O’Malley and Palmer 1996) and child protec-tion (see Parton 2008; cf. Rose 1996a) are governmental enterprises thathave been highly influenced by broader shifts and trends in liberalism.Among the more recent trends has been the development of community-based governance. Indeed, scholars have generally agreed that there hasbeen a significant transformation from the welfare state (which grew toprominence following World War II) to what writers have commonly re-ferred to as neoliberalism. For example, writing almost two decades ago,Rose and Miller (1992) argued that criticisms against welfare in the 1970s1
have led to its gradual demise (cf. Rose 1996b). In its place, particularly inthe 1990s, the neoliberal state focused on risk management, ‘‘in a way thatgoverns communities as participating in the management of these risks, andnot relying on the state for any particular form of . . . expertise’’ (Levi2000:581). Governmental expertise was thus increasingly tied to the com-munity, and by the 1990s, public policing and child protection (along withother governmental institutions) emphasized local service provisionthrough community engagement.
By looking at the official discourses of the growing interoperabilitybetween public policing and child protection in Canada and the UnitedKingdom, we hypothesize that we are in the midst of a subtle yet significantgovernmental shift away from community and toward public safety gover-nance. Our paper’s raison d’etre stems from our observation that discoursesemphasizing local/community expertise in policing and child protectionhave largely muted because of repeated criticisms over the lack of inter-agency interconnectedness.2 As a result, Canada and the United Kingdomhave developed national interagency databases for the identification andmanagement of at-risk or high-risk persons. The institutional integration ofchild protection and public policing in this manner yields a different kindof governmental knowledge, and hence engenders different forms of socialregulation. We are cognizant that at present this transformation is still inits infancy. Yet the specific case of policing and child protection seems to
1. Dire warnings against welfare-state capitalism were advanced by Friedrich von Hayek as early as 1944 inhis book The Road to Serfdom. However, such criticisms only reached mainstream currency in the 1970s.
2. For example, Ontario’s Campbell Commission responded to failures in the Paul Bernardo investigationand the Gove inquiry in British Columbia looked into a child fatality. In the United Kingdom, theBichard and Lamer inquiries (respectively) are among the many parallel instances. Despite the disparityof their contexts, what these have in common are their recommendations for greater interagency infor-mation sharing and the adoption of risk assessment technologies.
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represent a broader social and governmental trend toward agency integra-tion.3 In our discussion, we thus briefly highlight the relationship betweenpublic safety governance and expertise. While we conclude that greaterresearch is required to decipher how the growth of agency networks trans-forms subjectivities and intergovernmental relationships, conceptually, wemake the case that public safety governance, rather than being integral tothe expanse of the neoliberal state, is instead emerging as a new rationalityof Western governance.4
COMMUNITY GOVERNANCE
Stemming perhaps from the late 1960s in the sphere of child protection,organizational discourses emphasized the virtues of community serviceprovision. In Canada, the 1969 report of the Commission of Emotional andLearning Disorders in Children (CELDIC) noted that services for childrenhad become too scattered through different governmental departments andvarious philanthropic organizations. The result was an assemblage of bu-reaucratic and disparate agencies, which CELDIC considered too distantfrom the clients they serviced. The Commission thus proposed a planin which services to children would be both provincially coordinated andlocally situated (Clague, Seebaran, and Wharf 1984). CELDIC’s view ofthe Canadian situation by the end of the 1960s was similar to how child andsocial services had developed since the 1950s in the United Kingdom, andthe 1970s brought with it similar criticisms of bifurcation, lack of coordina-tion, and distance (Department of Health and Social Security [DHSS] 1982;Sanders and Thomas 1997).
From the 1970s through the 1990s, governments reoriented child pro-tection in Canada and in the United Kingdom to operate mainly as anassemblage of autonomous community agencies, but with some form ofbroader governmental coordination. In Canada, this restructuring began inBritish Columbia (BC) in 1972. Highly influenced by the CELDIC report,that year the government of British Columbia decided to replace the prov-ince’s Children’s Aid Societies and the rural child protection department. Intheir place, British Columbia implemented province-wide Community Re-source Boards (Clague et al. 1984). The new arrangement meantadministrative autonomy of the local Boards, the BC government main-tained a macrogovernance role by providing the Boards with statutorydirection. In the government’s view, child protection workers who acted inpartnership with community members could best address the unique re-quirements of local communities. Effective programs for addressing childabuse would thus be the result of empowered community actors (see Shera
3. For a discussion of the role of such signifiers to governmental transformation, see Foucault (1986).4. It is important to note that ours is an analysis of official and published discourses rather than of realities.
This is in keeping with the genealogical approach found within studies on ‘‘governmentality.’’
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and Page 1995; cf. Parton 2006). Just over a decade later, the province ofAlberta had followed suit. At a 1985 Ministry of Social Services and Com-munity Health conference, Alberta’s Director of Corporate Developmentpointed out that province’s newly restructured ‘‘flexible, efficient, and cut-ting-edge,’’ child protection services fully exemplified the idea that ‘‘it takesa village to raise a child’’ (Community Panel 1992). The trend toward com-munity empowerment in child protection became firmly entrenched in the1990s, with provinces and territories adopting similar models (HRSDC2002). Hence, by the close of the millennium, the federal government’s na-tional review of child protective services aptly pointed-out that, ‘‘Alljurisdictions make use of . . . community-based services for prevention andprotection’’ (HRSDC 2002). A similar emphasis upon community serviceprovision in the United Kingdom had led to the development of locally sit-uated Area Child Protection Committees in the 1990s. Like Canada, theRoyal Society for the Protection of Children centrally coordinated these(Sanders and Thomas 1997). The U.K.’s two-tier system of government(compared with Canada’s three-tier system) is nevertheless a subtle butsignificant difference between the two countries. In both countries, childservices became locally oriented. Nevertheless, the U.K.’s Royal Society forthe Protection of Children plays a national role in addressing and aiming toprevent larger-scale institutional abuse (cf. DHSS 1982). There is no Cana-dian analogue because the provinces and territories, rather than the federalgovernment, have traditionally been responsible for child protection.
During the same period in Canada and the United Kingdom, a similarreorientation took place in public policing (Holdaway 1983; Murphy andMuir 1985). The adoption of community-based policing in the late 1970s andthrough the 1980s prompted the reintroduction of foot patrols and the de-velopment of various programs, such as Crime Stoppers and NeighbourhoodWatch. These programs have sought to enhance police-community relationsand encouraged public cooperation with the police (Murphy and Muir 1985).Still, advocates of community policing criticized such efforts for their lim-ited scope, duration, and intensity (cf. Trojanowicz 1990). Rather than theapplication of a handful of community-oriented programs, proponents ar-gued for the wholesale adoption of a service model and policing style basedupon police-community consultation (Alderson 1979; Normandeau andLeighton 1990; Bayley 1994). What advocates envisioned was a policingmethod in which Constables and police managers directly consulted andworked with community members to address local problems that under-pinned crime (Normandeau and Leighton 1990; Alderson 1998). In Canada,Normandeau and Leighton’s Vision of the Future of Policing in Canada,produced for the federal Solicitor General, challenged Canadian police ex-ecutives to fully adopt community policing by the year 2000. Similarly, inthe United Kingdom, Alderson (1979, 1998) consistently advocated for theHome Office’s adoption of Community Police Councils (consultative groups)during the 1980s and 1990s.
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In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) executivesperhaps led the charge in adopting community policing by promoting police/community consultative groups as their ‘‘business model’’ during the 1990s(see Commissioner’s Office 1990, 1992, 1993; Clarke 2002; Deukmedjian2006). The RCMP also promoted community integration and local empow-erment through community-based training and community leadershipinitiatives (Deukmedjian 2006). The new training program encouraged re-cruits to interact with local volunteers and business owners in a newly builtacademy-shopping plaza. Community leadership bolstered managementconsultation with rank-and-file and community groups (Conference Boardof Canada 2000). The adoption of community policing by the RCMP is espe-cially representative of Canadian policing because, in addition to its federalrole, the RCMP police provincially and territorially except in Ontario, Que-bec, and Newfoundland. The RCMP also police hundreds of Canadianmunicipalities (including in Quebec and Newfoundland). Nevertheless, theRCMP was not alone. Provincial police statutes in Ontario and Quebec wererevised to mandate community policing as a core police function in theseprovinces (see R.S.O. 1990, chap. P.15; R.S.Q. 2000, chap. P-13.1). In short,during the 1990s, Canadian policing adopted community service delivery,which entailed local consultation for addressing local problems. In theUnited Kingdom, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act similarly entrenchedcommunity policing (1998, chap. 37, sect. 17). Under this legislation, ‘‘localpolicing has become the prime focus for reducing crime and disorder, build-ing upon local partnerships’’ (Wright 2002:146; see also Audit Commission1993; Crawford 1999). Local police units (Basic Command Units [BCUs])function as mini-police departments. The Act empowers Constables and po-lice managers to consult communities in identifying and addressing localissues for preventing crime. The Crime and Disorder Act also mandatesBCUs to work with local partners in mobilizing local resources (1998, chap.37, sect. 17; Wright 2002). The key difference between Canada and theUnited Kingdom has been that the U.K.’s Home Office positioned commu-nity policing as one tier in a multitiered approach, which later also includedan intelligence strategy for countering terrorism, transnational drugtrafficking, and organized crime, etc. (NCIS 2000). In Canada, police exec-utives touted community policing as a model guiding all police services (seeConference Board of Canada 2000).
In sum, community service reorientation promised to rejuvenate polic-ing and child protection, which were perceived by critics as bureaucraticallycumbersome, disorganized, inflexible, slow, and/or out of touch (cf. Rose1996b). Engagement between local government and the community prom-ised to alleviate these. Indeed, local service delivery promised to respond tothe needs of local clients because the community was empowered to play adirect role (Levi 2000). In this way, community governance offered ‘‘fast,friendly, and flexible’’ service (to borrow from one of the RCMP’s many cor-porate slogans of the 1990s—see Deukmedjian 2003:341). Of course, there
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were unforeseen issues. The bolstering of local empowerment became crit-icized for weakening efficacy at macro levels of governance (cf. Amin 2005).5
Such critical discourses found fertile ground within the contexts of inquiriesinto the deaths and homicides of children, and in federal policing policy.
COMMUNITY PROBLEMATIZATIONS
Child protection and public policing have unique institutional histories andorganizational cultures. It is therefore quite remarkable that despite theirdifferences, discourses that specifically problematized the failures of com-munity governance in preventing the deaths or homicides of childrenemerged in both institutions in Canada and the United Kingdom. Indeed,as both institutions oriented their service delivery toward solving theunique problems of local communities, several commissions of inquiry overthe deaths (or homicides) of children have criticized child protection andpublic policing for their localism. Moreover, with few exceptions, these com-missions have proposed a common solution: interagency coordination andinformation sharing. It is also remarkable that such official discourses pre-date the technological and political conditions for implementation—whichonly began to develop in the 1990s.
Indeed, in the United Kingdom, from 1973 to 1981, the governmentcommissioned 18 different public inquiries into the deaths of children underthe care of child protective services. In their 1982 review of these commis-sions, the U.K.’s DHSS found that the common problem commissionersidentified was that in each of these cases, ‘‘information scattered between anumber of agencies [was] never systematically collated to form a more com-plete view than individual workers could achieve separately’’ (DHSS1982:35). Commissioners were of the opinion, not only that child protectionagencies needed to coordinate information, but that there also needed to becoordination and sharing of information held by criminal justice, healthcare, and educational agencies—indeed across a broad spectrum of govern-mental service provision. Of course, the DHSS also found that none ofthe recommendations had been implemented. Two decades on, despite theintegration of child protection within many local police station-houses (toaffect better interagency communication and cooperation), Lord Lamingcriticized the general lack of coordination. Lord Laming (2003:9) reiteratedcalls from inquiries of decades past that, ‘‘Effective action designed to safe-guard the well-being of children and families depends upon sharing relevantinformation on an inter-agency basis.’’
In Canada, public inquiries into child protection started in the late1980s. The most famous are the Hughes (1991) inquiry into institutional
5. An interesting rebuke of community policing along these lines was leveled against the RCMP in 1998 byCanadian journalist Paul Palango, in his book The Last Guardians. Palango claimed that the RCMP’sfocus on community policing devastated their capacity to address corporate and organized crime.
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abuse at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland, and the Gove(1995) inquiry into the death of Matthew Vaudreuil in British Columbia.In the wake of these, reviews of child protection have become relativelycommon. As with the United Kingdom, such inquiries have consistentlyimplicated communications failures within and between child protection,police, and other agencies. Hughes (1991), for instance, recommended thatthe government indefinitely store all child protection records in a centraldatabase to facilitate investigations. He also recommended changes in thelaw to require the police to share allegations and reports of abuse with theDepartment of Social Services. Nearly half a decade later, Gove (1995) re-ported that in British Columbia, child protection executives have ‘‘beenaware for years that . . . there is poor coordination among ministries andcommunity agencies in the delivery of child welfare services. The executivecommittee has done little to address these deficiencies.’’ Gove touted riskassessments to identify children with a propensity for abuse. This hinged oninformation from sources (such as the police) traditionally distant fromchild protection (see Cradock 2004). In response, the British Columbia gov-ernment reorganized child protection in the province by centralizing itsadministration within a single ministry (although maintaining localizedservice provisions). Nevertheless, 10 years later, the problem identified byGove persisted. In 2006, Hughes (2006:112) observed that child protectionservices,
. . . still did not contain all the pieces of the puzzle it was asked to solve. One ofthe key issues raised in this review has been the need, 10 years later, for betterprocedures for reporting and sharing information—especially about childrenin care of the Ministry—amongst Ministry social workers, delegated agencystaff, police, medical practitioners, Coroner’s staff, teachers and school coun-sellors, and other care professionals. This apparent reluctance to share neededinformation has some basis in law. . . . But it may also reflect that many in thechild serving system continue to work in ‘‘silos.’’
These inquiries identified two problems. First, they criticized the com-munity orientation of child protection for engendering microscopicexpertise premised solely upon local knowledge. Second, they criticized theinstitution’s limited focus on abuse and neglect. A very similar trendoccurred in public policing.
In Canadian policing, the failure of Ontario agencies to apprehend PaulBernardo expediently became the subject of judicial review. After a six-yearspree in which Bernardo sexually assaulted at least 18 young women andmurdered 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy and 15-year-old Kristen French, po-lice arrested Bernardo in 1993. He was convicted for the two murders in1995. Bernardo escalated his sexual assaults against the young womenwhile changing residence to different police jurisdictions. Justice ArchieCampbell’s (1996) report was scathing. Campbell (1996) found that thedifferent Toronto and Southern Ontario police divisions ran locally isolatedinvestigations. Indeed, Toronto police questioned Bernardo in 1990 based
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on a tip, and obtained DNA samples. However, Bernardo moved to the Ni-agara region three months later. Toronto police were aware of the move butdid not inform the Niagara police. Their investigation cooled: the forensicslab took 25 months to analyze the DNA samples and there were no newcases in Toronto for the police to investigate. Worse still, after police discov-ered the murdered bodies of French and Mahaffy, police in Toronto andNiagara began to focus on Bernardo, but ran competitive and parallel in-vestigations (Campbell 1996). Campbell made a number ofrecommendations, among these; he called upon police agencies to adopt au-tomated case management systems to enable multijurisdictionalinformation sharing and analysis (Campbell 1996).
Beyond the problems of cross-jurisdictional incoherency, policing athigher federal, national, and international levels could not align with com-munity policing. Indeed, despite the demand by Canadian police executivesfor the adoption of community policing across all levels of service, policymakers in federal policing, which typically address large-scale drug traffick-ing, organized crime, and terrorism, were struggling to identify ‘‘thecommunity’’ at national and transnational levels (Deukmedjian and de Lint2007). The absence of any obvious locality for partnerships led policy mak-ers to abandon the idea in 1997. Instead, federal policing adoptedconsultative partnerships with other police, security, and intelligence agen-cies. Policy makers in federal policing branches thus effectively redefinedcommunity policing to facilitate joint enforcement and information sharinginitiatives between these professional ‘‘communities of interest’’ (Deuk-medjian and de Lint 2007:248). The Prime Minister publicly announced hissupport for this new approach later that year in his Speech from the Throne.Jean Chretien told Canadians that the ‘‘government will . . . integrateinformation systems of all partners in the criminal justice system’’ (Chretien1997). While it seems that this approach was slow to get off the ground, iteventually led to the Solicitor General of Canada’s announcement of the In-tegrated Justice Information initiative in 1999. The RCMP, given itsnational and transnational scope of operation, housed the integrated justicedata system (Solicitor General Canada 1999). This marked a significantshift in policy.
During the latter part of the 1990s, Canadian policing increasingly be-came interlinked through interagency databases and information-sharingrelationships (cf. Ericson and Haggerty 1997; cf. Sheptycki 2003). Amongthe more significant of these has been the expansion of the RCMP’s ViolentCrimes Linkage and Analysis System. The system helps investigators inpolice forces across Canada to identify commonalities in homicide modusoperandi (Ramsay 1998). The RCMP has also established joint task forcesand integrated data systems with ‘‘OPP, Toronto, York Regional, PeelRegional Police, Revenue Canada, Immigration, and Criminal IntelligenceService Ontario,’’ for addressing organized crime linkages (Levesque1999:15). The RCMP abandoned community policing in December of 1999
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(Conference Board of Canada 2000). In its place, executives adopted ‘‘inte-grated and intelligence-led policing,’’ based largely on a model that hadalready gained prominence in the United Kingdom (Deukmedjian 2006).Police agencies in Ontario and Quebec followed suit beginning in 2002,spurred in part through their joint initiatives with the RCMP (cf. OACP2002).
INTELLIGENCE: THE SOLUTION TO COMMUNITYGOVERNANCE PROBLEMS?
From the mid-1990s, ‘‘intelligence’’ has increasingly displaced ‘‘commu-nity’’ in policing discourses. In the United Kingdom, this has been the casesince 1993 when the Audit Commission proposed a new policing model cen-tered on police-informant relationships (Audit Commission 1993; Maguireand John 1995). Since then, Chief Police Officers have adopted the languageof ‘‘intelligence-led policing’’ to describe police services. In essence, intelli-gence-led policing,
. . . involves linking together information from a wide range of sources—fromopen source and publicly available information to that obtained covertly in or-der to build up a composite picture. This will highlight links between people,objects, locations and events that are essential in supporting the policing pur-poses described. Identifying these links enables decisions to be made aboutpriorities and resources needed to manage risk. (National Centre for PolicingExcellence 2006:12)
The problem during the latter part of the 1990s was that the relation-ship between intelligence-led and community policing was unclear. TheHome Office and Chief Police Officers touted both simultaneously. As localpolice units were increasingly empowered to address local problems, ChiefPolice Officers were also touting an intelligence-led approach that requiredpolice to develop and tap into local informant sources. These strategies ap-peared disparate and even contradictory. The intelligence-led approachseemed appropriate for addressing major cases involving drug traffickingor terrorism (Maguire 2000) whereas many considered community policingto be appropriate for addressing local issues (Alderson 1998). As a result,Constables have generally sustained a reactive style inconsistent with ei-ther model (cf. Cope 2004). It was not until the turn of the millennium thatthe National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) proposed the NationalIntelligence Model (NIM)—a single intelligence-led approach at ‘‘nearly’’ alllevels of policing (NCIS 2000). While there has been some recent discussionof reintegrating community policing and the NIM through neighborhoodsafety initiatives (see Maguire and John 2006) and the hiring of reassurancepolice officers in the past half-decade, community policing has taken asecondary role to intelligence-led approaches.
In Canada since early 2001, police have outwardly opted for a combina-tion of the U.K.’s intelligence-led approach and interagency information
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integration. As (now former) RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli (2005) suc-cinctly explained in his speech to the Canadian Association of Chiefs ofPolice:
. . . information—and the analysis and understanding of it—comes from a widearray of sources and will be more proficiently turned into intelligence with theassistance of experts from a wide array of fields; therefore, intelligence-ledpolicing depends upon our willingness to work with, alongside, and in partner-ship with law enforcement, security agencies, the criminal justice system,NGOs, corporate and government colleagues. In short—intelligence-led polic-ing requires an integrated approach.
This has led to a focus on developing and strengthening interagency in-formation sharing through the integration of new and existing police datasystems.
It is important to note that the U.S.-led war against terrorism followingthe events of September 11, 2001 has not been the cause of this trend (wehave indeed traced the problematization of interagency information sharingto the 1970s). It is nevertheless frequently referenced in justification ofborder integrity through an intelligence-sharing ethos. Conceptually (andperhaps metaphorically), this has fostered a shift away from promotingcommunity empowerment to an emphasis upon controlling transient risksto communities (i.e., enhancing community integrity). Moreover, thesetrends, taken as a whole, have culminated into the present governmentalshift toward public safety governance manifest by the reorganization of thefederal Solicitor General into Public Safety Canada and the realignment ofthe comparable provincial ministries. Among the more ambitious projectsunder Public Safety Canada’s auspices has been the National IntegratedInteragency Information (N-III) system, which according to the RCMP, ‘‘. . .supports the integrated, intelligence-led law enforcement efforts of Cana-dian police services and public safety agencies’’ (RCMP 2007). The systempresently houses information from Canadian police and border securityagencies. This allows agencies to coordinate investigations, identify caselinkages, and otherwise collectively and strategically manage risks (RCMP2007). In the near future, the system will be expanded to include databasesfrom governmental agencies outside of public policing and border security.Indeed, Public Safety Canada is ‘‘. . . expanding the interoperable environ-ment to include other departments involved in dossiers related to health,safety, crime and national security’’ (PSC 2007).
This discursive shift toward intelligence and interagency integrationthrough shared system access is indeed occurring in the areas of child pro-tection in both Canada and the United Kingdom. The community isbecoming less a partner and more a source of information for coordinatedevaluation and response (cf. Cradock 2007; cf. Parton 2004). At the sametime, public inquiries have called for an expansion of responsible agenciesand have redefined the calamities from which to protect children. Indeed,the recommendations of Gove (1995) for risk analysis, together with both
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the recommendations of Hughes (2006) and Laming (2003) for informationintegration from disparate agencies, suggests a redefinition of the objectof child protection beyond abuse and neglect. As Parton (2004, 2006) andCradock (2007) show, the child protection mandate is increasingly expand-ing to safeguard children from all manner of nonspecific harms. Quitesimply, there is a subtle transformation occurring in both the object of childgovernance and the formation of expertise in enabling child governance, re-quiring the coordinated resources of information-gathering agencies whosesurveillance is (ideally) seamless.
As already alluded to, both Hughes (2006) and Lord Laming (2003)recommended the adoption of informational-led practice. For Hughes(2006:120):
There is enormous promise . . . in the use of linked administrative data files toboth sharpen and broaden our understanding of what is happening to the chil-dren in our care. Linkages can be made between sets of data to examine, forexample, use of hospitals and medical services by children known to the Min-istry. . . . Ministry data can be linked with records from schools, showingeducational progress of children in care from year to year. Linkage might bemade to the youth justice system or, later, to income assistance files.
Lord Laming was more adventurous. He recommended a nationaldatabase whereby every child would ‘‘be registered shortly after birth, orupon arrival in this country, and then ‘‘tracked’’ throughout their child-hood’’ (Lord Laming 2003:368). They have thus called for a data networkwith multiple entry and exit points widely distributed ‘‘horizontally’’ (to useHughes’ word) among multiple agencies.
Arguably, the emergence of ‘‘risk’’ in child protection during the early1990s has buoyed this turn to the discourse of data sharing and coordinationas it necessitates the management of data culled from a variety of sources.According to Garrett (2005), social work is in the midst of such an electronicturn. Interlinked databases, such as Risk of Offending Generic Solution andthe Integrated Children’s System, are transforming intergovernmental re-lations. As such, human service professionals, ‘‘become partners in creatingthe global knowledge and the technological infrastructure that deliver in-formation when and where it is needed to guide their decision making andcreate systems that learn’’ (Schoech, MacFadden, and Schkade 2001:1).This has led Schoech et al. (2001:19) to envision the ‘‘intelligent organiza-tion’’ whereby virtual intelligence from multiple agencies becomes a basisfor expertise and decision making:
The intake agent will know the assessment process for all the local agenciesand customize the assessment to the current situation no matter what the pre-senting problems. The agent can also search for specialized expertise, ifneeded. If stored expertise is inadequate, the agent could request the most ap-propriate experts from other agencies to join the intake assessment via video,audio, or chat conferencing. This organized use of human and stored expertisewill allow the system to work more efficiently and effectively.
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Inquiries into child protection systems have already suggested ways toengage health, education, policing systems, etc., in common approaches. Theypresumed that these agencies already have, or are otherwise developing,elaborate information technologies. The call now is to move beyond localknowledge and expertise and engage intelligent interagency systems to iden-tify those at risk for designating the appropriate preventive assemblage.
PUBLIC SAFETY
In Canada and the United Kingdom, child protection is integrating withpublic policing through a broader ‘‘public safety’’ framework in governance(cf. Parton 2006). In relation to children (though this applies much morebroadly), this means that police and child protection professionals ideallyidentify and manage those at risk of offending, abusing, or neglecting chil-dren, while at the same time safeguard those at risk of victimization. Thedistinction (between investigation/enforcement and safeguarding) maybe illustrated through relatively recent developments in Canada andthe United Kingdom. In Canada, the federal Human Resources and SocialDevelopment’s policy review of child protection notably recognized the in-stitution’s convergence with policing (HRSDC 2002). This report exem-plified the investigation and enforcement nexus of public policing and childprotection in criminal cases of physical and sexual child abuse or neglect:
In many cases, the joint investigation approach taken by police and child wel-fare officials minimizes the number of times a child is interviewed, coordinatesthe involvement of both parties and reduces interference or corruption of ei-ther party’s case against the alleged perpetrator of abuse. . . . Most jurisdictionsemploy investigation protocols to achieve a high level of collaboration betweenlocal police and child welfare authorities, and many protocols involve hospitalsor medical experts in coordinated investigations of abuse. Police decidewhether to lay charges under the Criminal Code at some point during or afterthe joint investigative process. The child welfare authority applies the defini-tion of ‘‘child in need of protection’’ to the situation to guide the ensuing childprotection process. (HRSDC 2002)
Thus, this narrative speaks to the way in which the different agenciesfunction in light of suspected abuse. Less developed in the report is a dis-cussion of any marriage of virtual information sharing and risk assessmentfor the management and safeguarding of risks. Nevertheless, the reportnotes the prevalence of both information sharing and risk assessment inalleged or suspected abuse cases:
Workers search a confidential, limited-access database of open, recently closedor investigated child abuse cases for previous involvement with child welfareauthorities within the jurisdiction. Authorities use a number of screening pro-cedures that establish thresholds for the level and immediacy of the response[some of which] are integrated with the risk assessment instrument used bythe jurisdiction. (HRSDC 2002, emphasis added)
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Despite having identified interagency information sharing and risk as-sessments, the report exemplifies a local reactive service orientation. Thereport represents the multiagency assemblage as a respondent to allegationsof criminal child abuse or neglect. The mobilization of the multiagency as-semblage is not ubiquitous; it is contingent and case by case.
Contrast this to the 2002 development of Social Services InvestigationsTeams (SSITs) in the United Kingdom. According to an Association of ChiefPolice Officers (ACPO) policy document on abuse investigations, SSITswork closely with senior police detectives to address institutional childabuse at multiple levels (ACPO 2002). They investigate allegations of abuse;conduct various victim support tasks; and safeguard children by vettingpotential abusers from employment in proximity to potential victims (ACPO2002). Risk assessments generated from multiagency databases underpinthese practices (ACPO 2002). Rather than operating on an ad hoc basis,SSITs are a fixture in the United Kingdom.
We therefore have the discursive representations of two quite differentapproaches, though both feature practices of interagency information shar-ing and risk management. Canada’s approach is mainly incident driven,whereby local interagency assemblages assess risks for the prioritization anddistribution of response resources (HRSDC 2002). Alternatively, the U.K.’spolicy points to the use of risk assessment in safeguarding children, inpart through the police’s vetting of potential employees from working withchildren (ACPO 2002). The United Kingdom buoyed traditional reactive ap-proaches (common to both countries) with an added layer of situational crimeprevention (or controlling access to potential victims—cf. Cohen and Felson1979). Of course, both of these representations are over a half-decade old.
Over the last three years, the United Kingdom has moved beyond the2002 ACPO policy with its development of the IMPACT Nominal Indextransnational interagency database. This followed from the Bichard inquiryrecommendations in the matter of Ian Huntley. In brief, between 1995 and1999, Huntley came to the attention of Humberside police and child protec-tion workers over 10 separate incidents involving allegations of unlawfulsexual intercourse with young girls and one incident of burglary (Bichard2004). Separate and uncoordinated investigations culminated in two crim-inal charges (rape and burglary). However, these charges were withdrawn.Furthermore, child protection workers did not prevent the children fromhis further contact (Bichard 2004; Sir Kelly 2004). Huntley subsequentlymoved to Soham where, having passed employment vetting, gained employ-ment as a school caretaker at the Soham Village College. Huntleysubsequently murdered two 10-year-old female students (Holly Wells andJessica Chapman). Multiple SSITs led to bifurcated investigations (Sir Kelly2004) and the local focus of police and social services had led to a cumber-some and unreliable process of employment vetting (Bichard 2004). As withprevious inquiries of this kind, both Sir Kelly (2004) and Bichard (2004)found that the Huntley case exemplified procedural inadequacies and the
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failure to appreciate important connections between isolated pieces ofinformation. Furthermore, different institutional mandates and valuesof police and child protection allowed Huntley ‘‘to slip through the net’’(Bichard 2004:12). From the social services perspective, Huntley was not afamily member of any of the children and therefore was beyond the service’smandate (Bichard 2004; Sir Kelly 2004). Child protection workers insteadfocused on the girls and their families, but the family problems weresystemic to the community. As a result, social services did little to addressthe immediate issue of the children’s improper relationships to Huntley.Throughout Sir Kelly’s (2004) report he criticized this inaction, suggestingthat the social service should have categorized the children as ‘‘at risk’’ and‘‘in need’’ of state protection (e.g., Sir Kelly 2004:34–5). As for the police,Bichard (2004) identified similar issues. The police’s investigation of Hunt-ley went beyond the mandate of their child abuse unit (again, becauseHuntley was not an abusive parent or guardian). Moreover, as far as theallegations of criminal sexual assaults, the police investigations yieldedlittle more than contradictory statements from a largely uncooperativewitness and victim base (many of the children stressed their personal will-ingness in entering into their relationships with Huntley, hindering asuccessful prosecution). Police thus had little bases for pursuing chargesagainst Huntley before the homicides (Bichard 2004; Sir Kelly 2004).Bichard (2004) nevertheless suggested at the time that the police could domore to safeguard the public. The question, of course, is what?
For Bichard (2004) the Huntley case demonstrated the incoherence ofcommunity governance. Moreover, it demonstrated the challenges in as-sessing danger absent some sophisticated mechanism for sorting largequantities of data with reference to finer distinctions of risk. This is pre-cisely what Bichard (2004) recommended, and on December 23, 2005, theHome Office responded by launching the Intelligence Management Priori-tisation Analysis Coordination and Tasking—Nominal Index (IMPACT-NIor INI) system at a cost of over d7 million (Home Office 2006a). The systempresently combines a risk assessment engine with information from theCriminal Records Bureau and from databases across all police agencies inEngland, Wales, and Scotland (Home Office 2006b, 2007a). This data inte-gration ideally allows investigators to ‘‘establish, in seconds, whether anypolice force anywhere else in the country holds relevant information on some-one they are investigating’’ (Home Office 2006a). In an example of how thesystem functions, the Home Office (2007b) points out on their Web site that,
A police check requested by Social Services relating to a 14 year old who hadrecently arrived in the country and wanted to live with his uncle revealednothing using the PNC [Police National Computer]. A further check with INIshowed that the uncle was currently under investigation for grooming youngfemales for prostitution and sexual harassment. Social Services presented thisinformation at the child’s immigration hearing and have stopped the uncle[sic] having access to the child.
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As mentioned previously, the Department of Public Safety Canada’s N-III system is a parallel development. Though it stems from a different gene-alogy, the N-III similarly facilitates Canada-wide ‘‘interoperability’’ andinformation sharing among government agencies (RCMP 2007). As with theINI, the N-III is a national/transnational metasystem, which integratesa multiplicity of systems and offers multiple agencies with access (RCMP2007). It is unclear when the N-III will integrate provincial and territorialchild protection systems, but the necessity for leveraging interagencyresources in the management of risks and our proximity to trends inthe United Kingdom means that such integration is not afar.
DISCUSSION: A SHIFT IN GOVERNANCE ANDEXPERTISE?
Conceptually, the literature on neoliberalism has described an alignmentbetween social policy and an emergent micro social-structuralist worldview.Within this perspective, our human agency is shaped by the communitystructures in which we live, work, learn, and play, etc. Given the shear di-versity of communities, this literature suggests that governments cannotpossess the requisite knowledge to micro manage. Thus governance (partic-ularly in the 1990s) became increasingly vested to local experts (i.e.,governance at a distance)—and where these were lacking, the role of cen-tral government became none other than engendering local expertise andempowerment through local agency partnerships. The government’s roleessentially became one of encouraging the formation of local frameworks forpromoting normative action.
At the same time, mobile and/or networked actors have posed asym-metrical ‘‘risks’’ to ‘‘the community’’ by their transcendence of it. In otherwords, while neoliberalism promotes local security through empowered andefficacious communities, local knowledge is largely dependent upon com-munal stability and integrity. Risks posed by transient actors (and/orconstituents of broader social networks) are less likely to be identified, un-derstood, or addressed. ‘‘The community’’ has thus been vulnerable tointerjurisdictional risks or harms. Indeed, a common feature of many of thechild homicide cases discussed above, perhaps epitomized by Bernardo andHuntley, were problematized by commissions of inquiry in large part be-cause of their interjurisdictional quality. As a result, there has been a trendtoward developing interagency data systems, justified within the relativelynew governmental discourse on public safety.
Public safety governance engenders a different form of governmentalexpertise: it focuses on risk management, but in a way that governs thesocial-governmental nodal-network, and not exclusively relying on anyparticular node for expertise (cf. Johnston and Shearing 2003; cf. Shearing2001). Simply put, public safety engenders networked governmental sub-jectivities. It engenders practices of leveraging governmental knowledge or
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intelligence (reified through systems like the INI and the N-III) to mobilizecross-agency actors. The Home Office (2007b) narrative presented aboveexemplifies this. In preventing a teen from residing with an uncle under in-vestigation for grooming young girls into prostitution the social servicesmobilized the police for the brokerage of INI knowledge. In turn, social ser-vices used that information to mobilize immigration to block the uncle’saccess to the child. This form of ‘‘safeguarding’’ children is a very differentchild protection function than the institution’s hitherto role of addressingparental abuse and/or neglect (Parton 2006, 2008). Nor is this governmentalshift merely limited to child protection, but is indeed occurring across alllevels and agencies of governance (e.g., Thompson 2004). Again, from theabove Home Office case, immigration is part of the public safety net, and itstands to reason that immigration officers can mobilize the public policeand/or social services, etc., when the institutional need arises. A similarshift in policing (from reactive case enforcement toward the management ofrisks through interagency intelligence sharing), of course has been underway for some time (Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Maguire 2000; Deukmedj-ian 2006). Nevertheless, the police are increasingly operating through anintegrated model, which emphasizes, ‘‘leveraging the resources of all agen-cies and departments . . . to achieve a common strategic priority orobjective’’ (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2004). This relativelynew discourse locates policing as a significant hub in an otherwise seamlessvirtual rhizome of public safety institutions and agencies. As the networkexpands, governance increasingly engenders the regulation of risks throughcross-agency and cross-jurisdictional mobilization and surveillance. PublicSafety Canada has succinctly referred to this trend as governing throughpublic safety interoperability (PSC 2005).
We propose that public safety represents a newly emergent governmen-tal rationality. At a conceptual level, neoliberalism functions through apresumption that we are malleable to local structural forces. As such, gov-ernments have encouraged local expertise and knowledge as a basis foraddressing community problems that are possibly unique to local structuralconditions. Neoliberalism encapsulates a micro social-structuralist (e.g., theChicago School) and economic (e.g., Friedrich Hayek) perspective (see, e.g.,Rose and Miller 1992; Rose 1996b). Public safety governance aims to inter-connect local communities and governmental agencies (nodes) byoverlaying virtual informational networks to identify, track, and assess in-terstructural risks. This does not per se promote a different worldview tothat of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, public safety governance relies on adifferent level of ontological analysis. Rather than local knowledge of sub-jects, it depends on virtual and centralized knowledge-networks (of perhapswhat Deleuze (1992) aptly referred to as ‘‘dividuals’’). As with the shift fromwelfare to neoliberalism then, public safety aims to constitute a new kind ofgovernmental subject and expert. The public safety agent now leverages in-tegrated governmental knowledge to mobilize various nodes of governance,
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and does so to distribute social risks. This is about access control rather thanper se being about encouraging local action from a distance. Risks are sup-posedly minimized by preventing risky subjects from gaining access to socialspaces comprised of potential victims. In this way, a person who poses a riskto children may be vetted from school-ground employment, or preventedfrom residing near children, etc. Central agencies reassert dominance andexpertise—not by empowering local actors—but rather by preventing thedevelopment of, or disrupting existing, social networks (however briefor long term) that engender the conditions of possible undesirable conduct(illegal or otherwise). This new governmental raison d’etre is resulting innovel institutions (e.g., Public Safety Canada), technologies (e.g., interagencyexpert systems), and practices (e.g., interagency queries, cross-jurisdictionalintelligence leveraging, etc.). Were we to instead conceptualize this devel-opment as consistent with neoliberalism, it then raises significant doubts asto whether neoliberalism is a coherent, or even a very meaningful, concept.
CONCLUSIONS
We explored the emergence of public safety governance in Canadian andBritish public policing and child protection as indicative of governmentaltransformation. We also recognized the limitations of this venture. To besure, we did not claim that the emergence of public safety interoperabilitybears its roots directly in the relative histories of policing and child protec-tion, though certainly these contexts have played significant productiveroles.6 There is also little doubt that governmental discourses and technol-ogies of public safety are becoming more pervasive in Canada and theUnited Kingdom (and indeed Europe more broadly—see Crawford 2002). Asthis is an emergent trend, further research is required to map interopera-bility relations among and between different nodal contexts (such asimmigration, education, health, etc.), as well as across any intersecting pri-vate spheres. While this has been beyond purpose, there have been somepromising explorations into the relationship between networks of privatesecurity and public policing (e.g., Johnston and Shearing 2003; Dupont2004; Lippert and O’Connor 2006). Still, this innovative literature haslargely emphasized the growth of private networks rather than private/pub-lic interoperability. As we gain a better sense of agency interoperabilityrelations, we can begin to ask critical questions on the ways in which thistrend in governance is reshaping our daily practices and relationships.
Of course, as public safety governs through our access to social spaces,one area of potential concern is the relationship between public safety andindividual rights discourses. Indeed, public safety governance functions be-yond any individual rights framework. While individual rights discourses
6. The Home Office continues to justify the INI as resulting directly from the Bichard (2004) recommen-dations (Home Office 2007c).
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function within a (Hobbesian) presumption that we are naturally passion-ate and reasonable agents, public safety rather assumes we are sociallyconstituted actors. While this is not per se any different from the neoliberalperspective, what makes public safety governance uniquely problematic isthat exclusions from social spaces are justified based on risk assessments,increasingly carried out by cybernetic systems beyond oversight and trans-parency. The assessments are premised upon dynamic assemblages ofgovernmental information on subjects, which is de facto trusted by officials(such as police investigation files, child worker records, tax assessments,etc.). In this way, the state may block a child from living with a relative be-cause of an ongoing police investigation; a person’s employment near aschool may be denied because of certain accusations by former neighbors;students may increasingly be isolated within a university campus because ofpublic school records (see, e.g., the Virginia Tech Review Panel 2007). Sopublic safety, as a system of thought and action, functions in part throughknowledge generated from contexts of suspicions, accusations, investiga-tions, etc. This is exacerbated by the questionable extent to which any of uswould be knowledgeable of the reasons for our exclusion from certain spacesand sites—and hence, absent scholarly enquiry into the ways in which ex-clusionary decisions are rendered, our ability to challenge the increasinghegemony of public safety discourse would indeed be quite limited.
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